Skilled devs, low costs: Cluj-Napoca emerging as a tech hub | Hacker News Reader

Skilled devs, low costs: Cluj-Napoca emerging as a tech hub

zdnet.com

95 pointsMz47 comments

I'm from Cluj, but this kind of sponsored corporate PR is not helping us at all.

There are amazing devs here and they don't work for companies like the ones in the article. Most of them are freelancers or working for startups.

Outsourcing companies are screwing people over considering the low overhead of operating. They charge around $80/h or more and pay devs maybe %20 that. The percentage is even worse in the rest of Romania, probably except Bucharest.

Endava and Fortech are both these types of companies, with Fortech offering something like the lowest dev salaries in Cluj. They still have guts to brag about their revenues though.

Spherik Accelerator, mentioned in the article, offer mentorship and aws accounts. That's why they're with their second batch now, and there isn't a single good MVP coming out. Nobody serious would ever apply. The "mentors" there are the same ones involved in every other IT "initiative" (Calin Vaduva, Philipp Kandal, etc.). It's the same people with new outfits and nothing good.

The only good thing in the article is mentioning Moqups, which are doing a great job.

There are other nitpicks with the article like

> We've seen some interesting JavaScript professionals with knowledge of CoffeeScript or AngularJS.

Finding good JavaScript developers here is close to impossible, that's why at some point a company was offering a $2K referral bonus.

> Romanian headquarters of UK IT services company

This is how all Cluj corporates operate. There's no "UK IT services company", it's just a UK PO box or an empty rented space.

Again, there are great devs here, they just don't work with the local companies.

I don't think we can honestly say there is something really serious coming out of Romania (with few exceptions) as long as our overall culture still lags behind. Entrepreneurial culture is built on the general state of culture, the juice youth grow in, the schools, the friends they make in high school and college, the teachers they have and so on.

The pool of developers is large, although not as large as the demand, but the mentality is still one of an employee. Very little UX skills. What to say then about having a far reaching, yet pragmatic vision. Funding also is an issue, but I'd say it's mainly the people, from devs to the way too many 'mentors'.

Nothing serious? How about BitDefender?

Regarding the culture of being employed, you should check Germany. Everyone wants to be an employee, lots of benefits. Making a company is extremely hard and capital intensive. A freelancer is chased by all autorities and they make you feel like an outlaw. And so on.

Compared to this, Romania is a littel heaven. Just the corruption and buericracy is holding it back.

They're one of the exceptions. However, antivirus market is really crowded, so I don't there're anything exceptional in that. Same with Avangate. VectorWatch is making the news these days, I'm personally not impressed, but if they do make the news, there must be something in it.

You're most probably right, the employee feeling is more broad than Romania.

From the article: "With a strong tradition in engineering, sustained by the technical universities, Cluj promises to ensure a constant flow of skilled graduates,". That's the angle: hire recent graduates. But hey, at least we have jobs.

I was there very recently. It's a nice place. It's a bit like you imagine Durham UK to be if it'd been occupied by the soviets - a university town with some incredible old buildings, but with a real feel of poverty about the place. Still, it was pleasent and felt safe. Everyone from the taxi drivers to waiting staff know that it's stuffed to the gills with programmers. Seems there's also a pretty impressive gender split - the tech events I went to tended to be 50% women.

    > he lists the geographic proximity to Western Europe

Getting to Cluj is a completely ball-ache. There are some infrequent flights from Vienna (on a terrifying TAROM turboprop), and a Whizz Air flight from Luton once a day, and presumably at least one flight from Bucharest. Train from Budapest or Bucharest takes for-e-v-a.

Yeah, Cluj is a great city. The people are friendly and quite hard working, IMO. There are multiple flights from/to Bucharest every day (and from there pretty much any place you want to go) so travel shouldn't be too difficult. There is undoubtedly a lot of undiscovered talent that can be had rather cheaply because of the rather undeveloped economy outside of IT in general. I hope it continues to grow and develop as more companies see fit to invest in Cluj and Romania in general.

I was there recently for a couple of weeks for work. Pretty ugly place to be honest, but like you say people are very friendly. Our office there had female dev but the general gender ratio there seemed heavily skewed towards women.

I wouldn't be fussed about going back.

I'm a guy who worked for one of these outsourcing behemots based in Cluj-Napoca named SoftVision. While on the surface everything looks great, you should know that life inside this company is pretty miserable. And this will affect you as a client because just as we are being constantly lied to destroying our motivation, you as a client will be also lied to: starting with being offered fabricated resumes and all the way through false information about the number of people allocated to a certain project (there are people who work with their name only on a several projects) and the number of hours worked.

If you're curious about more hit up SoftVision on Glassdoor but change to a date based sorting, because their default sorting seems to favour glowing reviews written by the PR department.

I'm not saying all outsourcing companies are like this and I'm most definitely not saying that you can't find skilled devs in Cluj-Napoca. Just try to avoid SoftVision and their web of lies.

You're pretty much describing most body shops that call themselves agencies.

Yeah, I've been hearing bad things about SoftVision from friends working there as well. So I wouldn't generalize, it just seems this particular company is worth avoiding.

I am wary of the "gosh look how cheap we can hire developers in $latest_broken_country_with_maths_education"

Managing teams across distance and cultures is hard and requires commitment - commitment that seems to vanish when hard things happen - remember when hiring programmers in Ukraine was a no-brainer? How many development teams got pink-slipped and how many got airlifted out with their families? Which one is showing the commitment ?

I applaud andrei512 for his entrepreneurial edge and desire to bring some of the world's cash to his home town.

But I wish that all those companies seeing 10% of cost of a London team will have backbones in a years time. I doubt they will. Backbones are expensive and these guys are looking for cheap.

Thank you! But I'm not offering cheap developers. I'm one of those kids who started coding by himself at age 10 and did really good at coding contests. I have a lot of friends like me. I can hook you up with one of them :)

edit: Also my plan isn't to bring cash to my town. My plan is to give power the real hackers of my town. Companies charge about $100/h and pay about $10-$15/h back to the developer. Money is already pouring in - it just goes the wrong way...

edit2: Yes. Romaina is a broken country. Cluj is not like that. I would have moved a long time ago if that would not be the case. Cluj is actually the only city in Romania that is growing in population.

  > Companies charge about $100/h and pay about $10-$15/h back to the developer.

Hurts to see this, but it's the sad truth unfortunately.

That's actually the same in most places with agencies, money are pouring in but doesn't go to devs. It's just the numbers might be higher in other countries. What you're doing is awesome, keep it up.

I'm from Cluj-N and I disagree with your following points: - "real hackers". I guess if you mean torrenting and refusing to pay for software products, then yes. - "Cluj is not broken". You need to take a walk through the city. Ahole drivers, bad infrastructure, bad services. Did I mention ahole drivers?

I think you might be from the bad part of town... where all the bad drivers and pirates where moved.

I usually rent an office 10-15 minutes from where I live so I can walk to work. No need to get in traffic or find a parking place and blame the system...

If you don't like Cluj then why didn't you move to Berlin, London, Amsterdam?

I am as wary as you of offshoring in general, but Romania is not that "broken". It has problems, yes; it's still quite poor, yes; but it's a relatively stable part of the world, raising very limited interests from movers and shakers (unlike the Balkans, Ukraine, Egypt or Israel, places with problematic geopolitical intersections).

> But I wish that all those companies seeing 10% of cost of a London team will have backbones in a years time.

To be fair, it's not a given that even London teams will have backbones in a year's time, given current property-price pressures and the easy access to global markets that London grants to local talent.

In that sense, the cold calculation is that you can pay £100 and have a 80% chance to have a backbone next year, or you can pay £10 and have a 50% chance; is that 30% extra worth 90% of costs to you? It's a legitimate question, and the answer might not be the same for every company.

That is a good point - the exact figures are devateabke but yes, thank you

My Brit friend moved there about a year ago, does motion graphics with remote clients in London. Loves it and lots of amazing scenery appearing on my FB regularly :) I'm working with an iOS dev from Cluj currently, good guy. Looking forward to visiting soon.

Northern Romania and Transylvania is culturally closer to Hungary, it's not really comparable to say, Bucharest.

Colour me biased (I'm romanian) but I think that Cluj is the perfect town to be based in if you have a well paying remote job.

Great internet (like everywhere in Romania btw), nice town, cheap living, nice places to hike to in the surrounding countryside, university town (aka lots of girls).

Except if you stop and look around, Cluj has the highest rents and building prices out of Romania.

If you're working for a western salary, then sure, it's cheap. Not for a regular Romanian, though - especially if you're not working in IT.

A friend of mine hired developers in Romania a few years ago and still uses the same team. This is just one data point, but they were really nice to work with (I helped my friend for a while).

Similar experiences working with teams in Vietnam and India, BTW. Teaming with developers in lower cost of living tax jurisdictions can make sense, depending on how tightly coupled dev tasks are. Even with time zone inconveniences, it can also be a lot of fun working with people remotely who are in different countries.

    > Similar experiences working with teams in Vietnam and
    > India

A very small dataset, but I've found the mindset of Eastern European teams I've worked with and Indian teams I've worked with to be massively different. The EE teams were very culturally similar to the more Western teams, but with funny accents.

The Indian outsourcing I've worked with has - with no exceptions to date - been an absolute clusterfuck. Incompetence compounded by arrogance, byzantine technical architecture, inflexibility, obsession with rank, authority, and certification, and a tendency to lie out of bad situations. It felt like identical experiences across three different projects with three different large IT services firms that were India based. I began to seriously worry I was going to start to have a subconscious racist reaction to Indian accents over the phone.

I'm sure there are dreadful Eastern European outfits, and exceptional Indian ones, but my gut reaction will be to reach for the Eastern Europeans first next time I need to outsource development.

Well, Romania as well as Hungary and Bulgaria are fully European cultures. Sure, there are historical influences and economic contexts that made them different than mainstream Western Europe, and one can quote "Balkans" as a different attitude, but in terms of mindsets and value systems EE and WE are in the same category, different than India, China and other geographical regions. Not passing a judgement value here, just pointing out the similarities and the reason why US/WE people can work easier with EE people than with, say, Chinese - just as those Chinese would work better with Vietnamese or Indonesians, etc.

As a particular element to note: say what you want about it, but behind the Iron Curtain education was taken very seriously in sciences and engineering (maybe less so in the so-called humanistic areas because those would risk to come in conflict with the official communist doctrine). The technology and labs in the universities were sometimes lacking, but they surely made up in terms of solid theoretical education. So the foundations were there for competency when the computer age dawned - what generally lacked was (still is) the capital.

I think in general working with large IT firms is always going to be a CF regardless of where they are from. This is especially true if you are a product dev shop as against enterprise IT. I think a better comparison would be small sized companies in India with the ones in Romania. I am not defending Indian outfits. I tend to agree that it is hard to find great tech companies to work with in India. But I suspect some of that has to do with just the sheer volume of tech outfits in India. As with anything its hard to keep average quality high with scale. Infosys used to be a top company on top tech campuses like IITs in mid 90s. I can tell you some of the guys who joined where absolute top notch tech guys back then. Those days are long gone. The issues that you point often are an outcome of working with incompetent or unmotivated folks. The best talent in India now works for companies that are catering to the local market (Snapdeal, Flipkart, Ola Cabs). So you may be better off looking at countries where top talent still is in the outsourcing business because local market doesn't offer enough returns for their talent.

Has anyone seen a comparison of developer billing rates by geographic region? A somewhat related question is how would one go about locating remote workers from a cheap region such as this. I know odesk is an option, but are there others to establish direct relationships?

You can get really good developers for anything between $35 and $80/hour. I help companies find developers in Cluj-Napoca. If you are interested send me a message on twitter @andrei512

With the current USDEUR for $50-$80 you can get excellent programmers in most of europe. And most of the world by the way.

Edit: it depends ofcourse if you get a company with projectmanagement, testers, overhead for that or just people coding in their attic. I find working with a small company of techies with a strong PM and process works well and is worth far more money. Not talking about outsourcing factories which are horrible.

As a remote worker from Romania, I'm also interested how do you connect a bit more directly with companies/employers.

Sure, why not. Outsourcing to Romania is kinda like outsourcing to some of the more rural parts of the United States.

Only they speak Romanian in this case and the price difference is far greater.

But still, more or less the same.

Now that I've planted that seed, I'll just go ahead and throw out there that New Mexico has an amazingly cheap cost of living.

The average Romanian IT expert/programmer speaks better English than most Americans. You'd be surprised about the quality of a conversation. And I'm not talking about tech...

I think you're kidding. And I'm a Romanian, and so are you, I think.

No, I'm not kidding and yes, I am a Romanian; from Cluj-Napoca actually. Why would I be kidding? I know few developers which have difficulties with the English language. I know many that know the difference between "who" and "whom" or between "color" and "colour". I can't account for all, of course, that's why I wrote "the average", in an attempt to group them by their skills. Maybe I did exaggerate the part with "most americans", but I've certainly seen enough examples of English being misused.

He believe too much in this urban myth.

My company (UK) has an office in Romania. There are devs there too and they're pretty good, competent at least.

Unsurprisingly we have no more client help-desk team here in London and it's in Cluj now...

No pun so apropos ought go unmade: ClujureConf, Eastern Europe's most eponymous Clojure conference.

Thank you for pointing it out: the "j" in the city's name is pronounced much closer to the "j" in Clojure and not like "zh" as the article mentioned. Also, in Transylvania there is a slight tendency to overstretch some vowels so: "kloooo-j" (pour les connaisseurs)

I do pronounce j on Clojure as zh. Is it officially wrong?

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